It may not make up for the $1,5-million per episode he has lost from the suspension of his TV show Two and a Half Men, and Twitter being Twitter he probably won’t earn a penny. But Charlie Sheen at least has the satisfaction of becoming the latest social media sensation.
On Tuesday lunchtime Sheen was a Twitter virgin, with nary a tweet to his name. By the end of play on Wednesday he was almost certain to have acquired that essential celebrity badge of pride: one million Twitter followers.
As the Guardian began writing this sentence, he had 813 569. By the end he had 813 995 — that’s how hot Charlie Sheen is in the Twittersphere. In fact, he picked up his first 100 000 followers while his Twitter feed was still empty.
His first ever tweet on Tuesday afternoon opened with his motto: “Winning — !” You would hope he used the expression in a paradoxical sense given the fact that in the past week Sheen has embarked on one of the most spectacular public self-combustions in Hollywood history.
‘My path is now clear … “
To his credit, he suggested a certain aware irony a couple of hours later when he tweeted “Winner —! 2012 …”, along with a picture of himself holding an image of an Oscar award with his own face superimposed on the statuette.
On his sixth tweet, Sheen introduced a Tigerblood hashtag, a reference to his comment that his veins were full of tiger blood. Within hours, #tigerblood was the number one trending subject on Twitter.
Sheen’s tweets reveal that he’s not getting enough sleep. He appeared to tweet on the hour, every hour, throughout the night. They revealed too that Sean Combs, AKA P Diddy, wants Sheen’s home address because he’s been “dreamin about a party like this all my life”. To which Sheen replied: “Get dressed my man — sending the driver —!”
On a more sombre note, Sheen also mentioned his twin boys, Max and Bob, aged almost two, who were taken away from his Los Angeles home by the Los Angeles Police Department officers after his estranged wife, Brooke Mueller, gained a restraining order against the actor.
According to TMZ, Sheen, who was last year convicted of domestic violence charges against Mueller, had threatened to cut her head off and send it to her mother.
“My sons’ [sic] are fine — ” he wrote. “My path is now clear — Defeat is not an option — !” — guardian.co.uk